All you have to do is buy a copy of THE CRUD MASTERS.

This Valentine’s Day I am going to post a picture of myself on my site, hiscockismoney.blogspot.com. How naked I am in the picture depends on you! For each copy you buy of THE CRUD MASTERS you get to remove one article of clothing from my sweet body. Just forward me the confirmation email and tell me what clothing you… would like removed.

WARNING! If no one buys the book then I will be fully clothed in the picture. This could ruin Valentine’s Day—-FOREVER!
Please help make this Valentine’s Day a sexy one.

BUY THE CRUD MASTERS! GET ME NAKED!

Clothing I need removed:

• Jacket
• Sweat shirt
• t-shirt
• pants
• pubic hair
• socks
• shoes

Don’t worry, I don’t wear underwear.

Buy The Crud Masters HERE
Email me at justingrimbol@hotmail.com

Wonderland Award winning author J. David Osborne took some time to discuss Bizarro Fiction with Booked.

Click HERE to listen to the interview and check out J David Osborne’s recommended Bizarro reads.

Michael A. Rose, author of Party Wolves in my Skull,  has a story up on Everydayfiction.com! Check it out.

by Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

It’s dark outside but all of the lights are on in the house as you step across the porch to the door.

Inside, everything looks distantly familiar, like a relative you’re seeing again after many years. The well-lit kitchen with dark cabinets that give off a smoky scent. The crooked doorway into the living room with the matching green recliner and couch. The dust around the fireplace that never seems to settle. And you know that down the hall is a bathroom with a chipped tub and purple cabinets.

But before you get there something, some sight, interrupts your living memory.

The door on the right before the bathroom. The door that was always padlocked, the one you never paid much attention to. The padlock is gone now, and the door has swung ajar. Peeking through the open doorway, stairs are dimly illuminated by light seeping out from the reaches of the basement.

You step down the stairs, clutching at the wall due to the lack of handrails. You turn to the left, the only direction open, and utter a small squeak.

Across the cellar from you, not thirty feet away, is a giant disembodied foot. You notice it is a left foot. It is hairless, and seems to be growing from the ceiling between crisscrossing pipes and wires.

A jolt of fear turns your legs to mush and you collapse back against the side of the stairwell as a flock of chickens stampede from a dark corner of the cellar towards the giant foot. They cluck and squawk as they attack the foot, pecking and clawing at its skin from toes to ankle. You notice no blood is spilt from the attack.

Whole sheets of skin begin falling away from the foot, revealing a white surface that looks hard and resembles plaster. The chickens ruthlessly continue their beak and talon work until the foot is completely devoid of its fleshy coating, then they race back to the corner.

Breathing heavily, you muster the strength, mental as well as physical, to stand up and approach the foot, which now looks like a statue. Constantly casting glances to where the feral chickens disappeared, you edge right up to the foot. You rap your knuckles against it, small bumps bruising your fingers. You continue doing this until a small crack forms. The crack stretches further, radiating out across the foot, leaking a thick semi-opaque mucous.

Not about to wait for the integrity of the foot to collapse, you race towards the stairs and back up into the house. You maneuver knowingly up stairs and down hallways until you find a bed that smells like you and you jump in, pulling the covers above your head.

You close your eyes.

Sometime later you open them, and a different light plays across your blanket. Poking your head out, you see sunlight blasting through the window. It is morning.

The smell of breakfast hits your exposed nose and you lumber down to the kitchen, hardly registering the padlocked door when you pass it to the bathroom. A quick leak then you’re sitting at the kitchen table, mom serving you a heaping pile of scrambled eggs.

She asks you how your night was. You devour the eggs and tell her your night was fine.

You rinse your empty plate off in the sink then step out onto a porch that looks vaguely familiar to you where you see a giant left hand sticking from the fields in the distance. You burp and it tastes like eggs and body odor.

__________

Joseph Bouthiette Jr. is fantastic.

by Anita Dalton
I used to love reading books about unexplained phenomena but over the past decade or so, it’s hard to just wallow in weirdness without having a lot of strident dogma crammed down my throat. It’s not enough just to marvel at all the possible explanations as to why Stonehenge is there. It seems that weirdness now comes with a price at times, and that price is selecting the reason why you think something odd happened and defending it at all costs, refusing to engage as you protect your theory.

Nowhere in Forteana has that attitude been more evident than in UFOs. Recent forays into books about UFOs turned into a tiresome experience for me, reading as history and science were twisted into almost unrecognizable shapes in order to “prove” the author’s pet theory. Gone was the fun that comes from discussing the impossible and trying on different explanations for that which ultimately cannot be proven. Rather, I was faced with an experience not unlike reading religious texts written by True Believers, a statement of “fact” that could not be denied. To deny it was to be called stupid for not seeing the “facts” or if I was unlucky enough to encounter one of the True Believers in person or online, the conversation could never deviate from the theory posited. Speculation and the fun of wondering about the unexplained just died.

What I’m trying to say here is that UFOs got old for me real quick.

Enter Mac Tonnies’ book, The Cryptoterrestrials. Though I discussed this book in depth, I knew nothing about Tonnies before reading this book and was appalled to learn he had died shortly before the book was released. He was only 34. That is a sickening shame because he has one of the most interesting minds looking into Forteana, especially UFOs. Luckily his family has kept his blog alive, and you should definitely read it if you get a chance.

In The Cryptoterrestrials, Tonnies posits that there are no little green men from outer space. Rather, the aliens are a humanoid species that developed alongside humans and for reasons we don’t understand, decided to remain hidden from us except for the times when they specifically show themselves. A theory fairly steeped in that which is unprovable, but Tonnies is not making such assertions because he is pushing a pet theory. My feeling as I read this book is that Tonnies just wanted the conversation to start again. New theories equal new discussions, and even if the theories cannot be proven entirely, discussing flawed ideas was a better option than just arguing dogmatic points. Dogma and Forteana do not mix, and this book really shows the absolute pleasure that comes from analyzing strange ideas just for the hell of it.

Take this, from a section wherein Tonnies is exploring why it is that SETI has yet to pick up a message from an alien life form:

Maybe one of the reasons we have yet to make irrefutable contact with extraterrestrials is because ET civilizations tend to reach a point of terminal decadence, an erotic cul-de-sac that precludes exploration. (Compare and contrast such an implosion to the “Singularity” many of us are waiting for with bated breath.) Sufficiently advanced ETs may while away the millennia in a hedonistic stupor, brains (or their equivalent) melded to pleasure-generating devices.

When statements like this are made outside of a need to “prove” them, they are delightful. Just speculating that the aliens are in their version of some Orgasmatron and have no desire to answer our call or call out to us is fun to think about.

The best part of such discussions, even as they veer off into the potential voluptuary habits of speculative humanoids, is that they are not just entertaining – they force us to consider all sorts of unlikely scenarious. They sharpen our brains as they amuse. They make us better thinkers as we search for all possible scenarios, as long as we don’t go digging into archeological finds and decide broken pottery shards were really depicting alien sex orgies and thus the Alien Orgasmatron theory is now fact.

Tonnies seems to me a man who understood the fun in just thinking of all the possible explanations and waiting to see what would happen next. It’s a shame he is no longer around to keep Forteana fun, but luckily he left a few books for us before he left. You should definitely check this one out.

by Spike Marlowe

Being a part of the New Bizarro Author Series is a dream come true. Not only do I get to see my book in print and share it with people, I also get to work with seven other incredible, brilliant, fun, fantastically weird-in-the-best-way authors.

Through March, each of the authors in the NBAS 2011-2012 will be featured on my blog at spikemarlowe.wordpress.com; each week a New Bizzaro Author will be highlighted. On Mondays, I’ll post a review of the author of the week’s book, on Wednesdays I’ll post an author interview, and on Fridays I’ll post an amazing piece of writing by the featured author.

What’s even better is that, each week, Bizarro Central will post exclusive outtakes from the interviews. These outtakes will give you a special look at each author’s unique personality and provide special insight into their books.

This week’s author is Eric Beeny, author of Lepers and Mannequins. Eric is incredibly intelligent; his interview outtake has the potential to start some amazing conversations. So, grab some pizza and beer, some of your most brilliant friends, and read what Eric has to say about writing, the economics of mannequin limbs, and how humans treat the “other.”

Lepers and Mannequin’s construction is poetic, purely on the structure of the sentence level. How does being a poet inform your prose writing?

Experimenting with syntax is a lot of fun. I like wordplay. I sometimes focus too much, I think, on just the line, the sentence and its construction, and how the projection of meaning is predicated on the inversion of words. I often have to snap out of it and remember there’s a lot more to do in a story or poem. It’s that balance between micro- and macro- that’s sometimes difficult to gauge, but I like when the micro- informs and shapes the macro-, when the small metaphors or plays on words transcend the sentence and are elevated into the wider spectrum of the work, carried off in the flow of the narrative so that the narrative becomes secretly about the play, like the artifice of the narrative itself is the fourth wall, or maybe a curtain on stage never drawn, fluctuating with the movements of the actors behind it, like turning an ocean on its side and the waves are made by actors’ hands swimming home from a capsized ship. I’m not really sure what the hell I just wrote.

Your book is being compared to Romeo and Juliet. In addition to being a powerful love story, it’s also a thoughtful examination of humanity, what makes us human, our relationships to our bodies, and what it means to be the other and how otherness keeps people apart. Would you like to speak to this?

The novel focuses on artifice (all politics is artifice), which we all use ironically to get closer to people (lying to get them to like us) but also to maintain our distance, our privacy (because we’re afraid of other people knowing too much about us, though our privacies are basically all the same). We want to feel like we belong to something, want to feel accepted and loved, even if it comes at the expense of those not admitted into the groups we hope to belong to: The “others”

Otherness has so many narratives already built in, like ready-made art. Alienation and suffering are universal. Race, gender, class… The narratives of those who do not belong to the dominant group (in literature and other media of the dominant group) are always labeled by some terminology designed to reduce the importance/relevance of their existence. Oddly, those in the dominant group are rarely the majority, they just have the resources to protect themselves: money to buy property, to pay police officers to protect that property, to fund an army ‘secure’ their overseas interests. Maybe that’s not answering the question. I feel the novel is socio-political (even economical, with the idea of mannequin limbs being a natural resource the lepers want to exploit), so I’m sorry I got going on that.

Humans want to feel accepted and loved but also have an innate desire to taxonimize, segregate and oppress. Individually, people are okay. Once they get into groups their behavior changes. They adopt the accepted norms of the group to fit in, to be accepted as valued members of the group—but this paradoxically reduces their individuality, as they use the group to define their identity. This, too, reflects the micro- and macro- aspects of the novel: Parts of a whole and their relationship to the whole—members of an organization, sentences of a book, limbs of a body, etc. The novel’s one-sentence paragraphs try to highlight the isolation felt by each member of the group (each limb of the body) while still serving some purpose only vaguely understood without the whole’s other parts.

———————–
Spike Marlowe and Eric Beeny are both a part of the 2011-2012 New Bizarro Author Series. Their books Placenta of Love and Lepers and Mannequins are available now on Amazon!